It was a scorchy summer, humidity settling in like a sizzling fog, but on early Saturday mornings, I made the trip to town to the ice house. Wearing just a T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops, I would eagerly step through the door into the frigid inner sanctum where blocks of ice were stored. I pretended I was Superman entering his Fortress of Solitude. It was like time travel, passing from the blistering summer into a frozen, silent void. I might as well have been in Antarctica.
Before I’d start hauling blocks to the truck bed to take out to the campground where I had a summer job, I’d close the ice house door and sit on an ice block to see how long I could stand the cold and dark before I had to get out. It was a silly test of endurance but it appealed to me. I was just sixteen and curious about my limits. Sometimes I could go ten minutes in there, shivering, my butt numb, until I had to bust out and sit in the sun to stop shaking.
The ice house owner’s son, this dipshit Melvin, worked there cutting ice blocks and loading trucks. He was a big, strong kid with a fiery red crew cut and a slack mouth. Melvin was a jagoff supreme and what they called “slow” back then. He was somewhere between juvenile delinquent and career criminal in training. I heard his father once say that Melvin was no smarter than a block of ice, that a block of ice had more of a future.
I always looked around cautiously for Melvin before I slipped inside the ice house, hoping that maybe he wasn’t working that day or off on an errand for his father. I imagined him in police custody for peeking in girls’ bedrooms. Or for far worse things. I imagined him capable of plenty of atrocities to come. He was about my age and so I guess he was exploring his limits, too. I wondered if he had many. Or any at all.
Sometimes, Melvin would know I was inside the ice house, and he would hold the door shut tight so I couldn’t get out. I could hear him laughing on the other side and banging on the door. He would grip the handle for dear life and yell, “Cold enough for you yet, asswipe?”
When Melvin finally let me out, he always called me Chilly Willy, after the cartoon character penguin, and I’d emerge shivering and sit on the edge of the loading dock until the sun and humidity baked me back to normal.
“Gotcha again, asswwipe,” Melvin would say, and then he’d plop down next to me on the edge of the loading dock, like we were old buddies. But he’d sit quietly like nothing had happened. He wouldn’t say a word, even if I asked him something. It was as if he had an on/off switch and it had been abruptly switched and the lights went off. Nobody home.
Melvin’s father would come along and slap the back of Melvin’s head hard and yell for him to get his “sorry, fat ass back to work.” Melvin would get a look in his eyes that scared me far more than when he chilled me out in the ice house. It was a look of pure hatred, a look I’d never seen in anyone I knew. It was a stony glare I only associated with villains in movies.
By August, it had managed to get even hotter, and we were in a run of days hovering past 90, the humidity stifling. You could drink the humidity with a spoon. My boss at the campground rustled up large coolers for the ice blocks and a canvas tarp to cover them for the quick trip to a huge campground freezer. It was only a few miles to town, and my boss encouraged me to drive with a lead foot.
“Time is money, kid,” he said, and then he winked and thanked the weather for allowing him to jack up the price of ice.
When I got to the ice house, there was an ambulance and a couple of police cars parked out front. I couldn’t imagine what could bring all that commotion to an old ice house on the edge of town. I supposed there’d been an accident. I wondered if I’d be able to get the ice so as not to let my boss down. I pulled around back to the loading dock and backed up to it. There was nobody in sight.
When I got out, two men in white uniforms brought a gurney out of the office and somebody was on it, but I couldn’t see who it was. A cop emerged from inside the ice house, rubbing his arms to warm up. He escorted the gurney around the corner, and I went up the stairs. At the far end of the dock, I saw Pete, one of the workers, a tall, willowy guy in his early twenties who’d only been back from Vietnam for a few months. He’d once told me the unexpectedly high humidity reminded him of Vietnam. He called it “The Nam.”
“You shouldn’t be up here,” Pete said. I saw his hands were shaking and he kept looking down.
Another cop emerged from the office and when he saw me, he placed his hands on his hips and set his jaw. He was tall, and his police cap was tilted to the side just a tad—what was then called a jaunty angle. I wondered how he could wear a hat on such a hot day. He looked me over.
“Who the hell are you?” he said firmly but not angrily.
“William—Bill. Bill Evers.”
“Well, Billy Boy, what are you doing here?”
“I’ve come for ice, officer. For out on the lake.”
The cop sniffed and smiled thinly.
“There ain’t no fucking ice today, Buster Brown. You best run along.”
The cop looked me over again, quickly, and then went back in the office. I turned to Pete, who had sagged against the building. He was trying to light a cigarette, but his hands and fingers weren’t working like they should. I took the matches from him, got one going, and lit the cigarette. He exhaled blue smoke and nodded.
“Much obliged, pardner.”
“What happened here, Pete?”
He shook his head sadly and exhaled more smoke. His eyes were moist. He rubbed them with his other hand.
“Go on back to the lake, Bill,” he said. “There’s nothing here for you today—go on, now.”
I crossed my arms over my chest and glanced at the office window, but I couldn’t see in.
“Who did they just carry out of here, Pete?”
He rubbed his forehead absently, like there was something on it that just wouldn’t come off.
“You can read about it in the paper,” Pete said, and then he giggled and sounded like a schoolgirl.
“Just fucking tell me, Pete. Okay? I’m a regular here.”
He looked up sharply.
“Oh, so you’re a fucking regular,” he said. “Sure—why the fuck not. Maybe you’re old enough for these things after all.”
“Maybe I am.”
“Well, it was Sanders they just hauled out.”
Pete sucked in smoke and exhaled, looking far off beyond the trees at the horizon. Maybe he could see The Nam from there.
“The old man, or Melvin?”
“Not the boy,” Pete said. “Old Man Sanders.”
“What the fuck happened?”
Pete finished his cigarette and flicked it into the air.
“Melvin the retard cracked his dad over the head with a crowbar. That’s what the fuck happened.”
I couldn’t speak for a moment. I also wasn’t surprised.
“Will Old Man Sanders live?”
Pete shrugged and then put his back against the wall and slowly slid down to a sitting position.
“Beats the shit out of me. They said he was alive when they took him out. That’s all I know.”
“How’d he look?”
Pete looked up and studied my face.
“Well, Bill—he looked an awful lot like someone who’d just had his head caved in with a crowbar. That fucking graphic enough for you?”
I nodded. I was surprised by how calm I felt.
“Can I bum a smoke?” I said, again surprised. I’d never really smoked a cigarette. A few puffs with friends. That now seemed like a long time ago. Ancient history.
“Knock yourself out,” he said as he tossed the pack to me. I leaned down and he lit it for me. He watched the lit match until the flame neared his finger and then he flipped it away. His hands were now working better. He seemed calmer.
“Where’s Melvin?” I asked.
Pete’s eyes narrowed and then widened. He sighed.
“He’s in the ice house, man.” Pete chuckled lightly. “He’s on ice, bro.”
I glanced over my shoulder toward the ice house.
“What’s he doing in there?”
“Not much,” Pete said, smirking. “Just hanging around.”
I walked across the long dock and opened the door to the ice house. I hesitated before stepping inside. My eyes had to adjust to the darkness. I stood there a moment with the cold enveloping me like an icy shroud. There were no outside world noises. Deathly quiet solitude.
My eyes slowly focused, and there was something to my right. A shape. I reached for it and instantly regretted it. I drew my hand back quickly. It was Melvin—hanging from a rope tied to a beam, feet barely off the floor. His face was blue, frozen, his tongue sticking out of a corner of his mouth.
I forgot the cold and stared at Melvin for as long as I could, losing track of time. It was, after all, the summer when I started testing my limits. I finally turned to go but stopped for one last look.
I said, “Cold enough for you yet, Melvin?”
Michael Loyd Gray is the author of ten published books of fiction and more than sixty published short stories. His novel The Writer in Residence (Between the Lines Publishing) was released in April 2026, and his story collection The Space Between Now and Then (Silent Clamor Press) will be released on May 22. Regal House will bring out his novel Emperor of the Mundane in 2027. Gray earned a MFA from Western Michigan University and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois. His novella Donovan’s Revolution won a 2025 International Impact Award for Contemporary Fiction, a Literary Titan Gold Award, and a 2025 Book Excellence Award for Fiction. His 2019 novel, The Armageddon Two-Step, won a Book Excellence Award. In 2008, his first novel, Well Deserved, won the Sol Books Prose Series Prize. He was born in Arkansas, grew up in Illinois, and now lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, with three cats and a lot of electric guitars.
I remember being a kid and getting ice blocks from an old icehouse during summers at a lake in central Illinois.